Paterson, Passaic, plicated

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His [Robert Smithson] break from painting would eventually lead him to construct—with the help of bulldozers and pilots and his wife and collaborator, the late Nancy Holt—“Spiral Jetty,” his best-known project, completed in 1970. It’sa fifteen-hundred-foot-long, fifteen-foot-wide spiral of stone that extends out into the Great Salt Lake, in Utah. According to the catalogue for an exhibition at the Montclair Art Museum, entitled “Robert Smithson’s New Jersey,” it was Smithson’s visit to his pediatrician that helped steer him toward that new work, and began a new chapter for American landscape art. His pediatrician was William Carlos Williams.

[…]

When Smithson arrived at Williams’s home, the older poet had recently suffered several strokes but had just published the final volume of “Paterson,” his epic set in and around the Great Falls of the Passaic, the raging seventy-seven-foot-high cataract in Paterson. In an essay written by the exhibition’s guest curator, Phyllis Tuchman, we learn that Smithson looked at paintings by Marsden Hartley, Charles Demuth, and Ben Shahn in Williams’s home, and that, according to Smithson’s friends, the artist took to heart Williams’s axiom “No ideas, but in things.” In 1972, shortly before Smithson died, he would describe “The Monuments of Passaic” [an essay that ran in Artforum in December of 1967] in terms of “Paterson.” “In a way, this article that I wrote on Passaic could be conceived of as a kind of appendix to William Carlos William’s poem Paterson,” he said.

The Source of Robert Smithson’s Spiral
Robert Sullivan, The New Yorker, June 18, 2014
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AG2024_1122725a or how many selves are you going to be

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AG2024_1122725a

INTERVIEWER

What about the act of creating something from scratch? Is that experience similarly spatial?

CARSON

I think about it as something that arrives in the mind, and then gets dealt with if it’s interesting. It’s more like a following of something, like a fox runs across your backyard and you decide to follow it and see if you can get to where the fox lives. It’s just following a track.

[…]

INTERVIEWER

I worry that—in America at least—the act of critical thinking is being devalued from a cultural perspective. Do you notice that as a thinker or teacher?

CARSON

That’s part of the thing that made me start thinking about hesitation. The last few years I was teaching, I was teaching ancient Greek part of the time and writing part of the time. And the ancient Greek method when I was in school was to look at the ancient Greek text and locate the words that are unknown and look them up in a lexicon. And then find out what it means and write it down. Looking up things in a lexicon is a process that takes time. And it has an interval in it of something like reverie, something like suspended thought because it’s not no thought because you have a question about a word and you attain that as you go through the pages looking for the right definition, but you’re not arrived yet at the thought. It’s a different kind of time, and a different kind of mentality than you have anywhere else in the day. It’s very valuable, because things happen in your thinking and in your feeling about the words in that interval. I call that a hesitation.

Nowadays people have the whole text on their computer, they come to a word they don’t know, they hit a button and instantly the word is supplied to them by whatever lexicon has been loaded into the computer. Usually the computer chooses the meaning of the word relevant to the passage and gives that, so you don’t even get the history of the word and a chance to float around among its possible other senses.

That interval being lost makes a whole difference to how you regard languages. It rests your brain on the way to thinking because you’re not quite thinking yet. It’s an absent presence in a way, but it’s not the cloud of unknowing that mystics talk about when they say that God is nothing and you have to say nothing about God because saying something about God makes God particular and limited. It’s not that—it’s on the way to knowing, so it’s suspended in a sort of trust. I regret the loss of that.

Anne Carson in The Paris Review

Zadie Smith on brut.media …
“people understand themselves in relation to other people” “how many selves are you going to be … it’s wild” “people are like this … they are not just what they say they are … they’re these other things as well” ” I use these emotions to play these people”

And off they went

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And off they went, emitting a perfect major triad via fart-noises with their mouths, sending down, as if in farewell, a rain of celebratory hats: flared Tops, Turkish house caps; kepis of various colors; a flower-bedecked Straw, falling rather more slowly than the rest, a lovely thing, redolent of summer.

[…]

a soldierly fixity of mind

[…]

only utter hopelessness will lead him to do what he must.

George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo

The Diplomat. Set in Barcelona.

Alexander Calder. Masi Lugano. Sphere Pierced by Cylinders, 1939 (at Pulitzer, 2015.) S and Star, 1941.

AG2024_1122723a or I am what I was and more

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AG2024_1122723a

Say what you will, and scratch my heart to find 
The roots of last year’s roses in my breast; 
I am as surely riper in my mind 
As if the fruit stood in the stalls confessed. 
Laugh at the unshed leaf, say what you will, 
Call me in all things what I was before, 
A flutterer in the wind, a woman still; 
I tell you I am what I was and more.

My branches weigh me down, frost cleans the air. 
My sky is black with small birds bearing south; 
Say what you will, confuse me with fine care, 
Put by my word as but an April truth,— 
Autumn is no less on me that a rose 
Hugs the brown bough and sighs before it goes.

Say what you will, and scratch my heart to find, Edna St. Vincent Millay (1922)

Learning from Las Vegas

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Fifty Years of “Learning from Las Vegas” by Christopher Hawthorne. New Yorker, January 27, 2023.

The cool appraisal of Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi’s revolutionary book has a lot to inspire the architects of today.

Most architecture students over the years have read the shorter second edition of the book, a paperback published in 1977, but the 1972 large-format hardcover version is the livelier and more revealing document, if also the more contentious editorial product. It is divided into three parts. The first largely reproduces the Architectural Forum essay and includes a close study of the Strip’s architecture, signage, and street furniture. The second provides an analysis of how trends visible in Las Vegas relate to larger developments in architecture and urbanism. This section is anchored by a tribute to “ugly and ordinary” architecture, including a now famous distinction between buildings that are “ducks,” which is to say, commercial structures that take the shape of what they’re selling—a Mexican-food shop in Los Angeles resembling a giant tamale, for example—and those that are “decorated sheds,” or expediently made buildings that gain energy from signage and ornament. In short, the duck is a symbol; the decorated shed applies symbols to a more conventional architectural frame.

[…]

twenty-first-century readers tempted to brush off “Learning from Las Vegas” as a neutral travelogue risk missing the real power of its analysis—and the ways in which its approach might make today’s architecture of activism and political urgency sharper and more effective. We forget it now, perhaps because the effort was so entirely successful, but the book’s larger goals went far beyond understanding the quickly growing cities of the American West. Scott Brown and Venturi also wanted to accelerate a changing of the guard in architecture. In that sense, the smoke screen of non-judgment allowed them to plausibly claim a kind of “Who, me?” innocence as they worked to make room for their own generation to start running things.

After all, their frustration wasn’t with the revolutionary nature of the modernist project so much as with how it had grown stagnant and pleased with itself. As they write in the acknowledgments of “Learning from Las Vegas,” “Since we have criticized Modern architecture, it is proper here to state our intensive admiration of its early period when its founders, sensitive to their own times, proclaimed the right revolution. Our argument lies mainly with the irrelevant and distorted prolongation of that old revolution today.”

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